Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months

Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by josefresco on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @12:48PM (#307191)

They don't.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by babul on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @01:33PM (#307249)

With a big enough user-base, they'll find a way. Occasional contextual adverts added to your timeline seems the obvious start.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by mattmaroon on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @05:17PM (#307548)

Everyone says this, and meanwhile we're watching companies with huge user bases flounder around helplessly without finding a way.

I think it's time we stop taking that for the gospel and admit that it's actually quite possible for a company to get a huge user base and still fail to make money permanently.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by run4yourlives on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @01:42PM (#307264)

they'll find a way

That wouldn't exactly be comforting if it was my money on the table.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by tom_rath on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:01PM (#307299)

Bah! This is The New Economy. You just don't "Get It".

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by run4yourlives on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @06:42PM (#307642)

Funny, I think I've heard that one before.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by bendemott on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @03:31PM (#307420)

I love it!

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by acgourley on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:04PM (#307304)

I'm very interested to see this play out. Pop wisdom says with enough eyes and with low enough operating costs there will be some way to make it as a company.

But there has to be an inflection point somewhere. Look at youtube, they will never be in the black (taken on their own).

So either they turn a profit, and this piece of wisdom is strongly reinforced. Or they go under, and entrepreneurs and VCs lose a certain glint in their eye. Or they get bought... and probably no one's mind is changed.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by thwarted on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:58AM (#307996)

This explains why they turned off IM access. No need to view the web pages, and no ad views, via IM. And people will respond better to ads on web pages than ads via IM.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by kirse on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @04:30PM (#307496)

big enough user base

Just like Facebook, right!?

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by shawndrost on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @07:59PM (#307720)

Facebook makes hundreds of millions annually. They could have been very profitable years ago (but chose instead to try for an even bigger hit). I don't know why people on this site keep talking about Facebook like it's a failed business.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by run4yourlives on Friday September 19, 2008 @06:00PM (#309511)

Because moneycomingin > moneygoingout or you die.

It doesn't matter how big either of those numbers are, as long as the equations stand. Most argue that the equation in facebook's case fails.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by nickb on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @01:54PM (#307286)

They have lots of options. Check this list for some ideas:

http://calacanis.com/2008/01/02/the-three-business-models-th...

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by run4yourlives on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:14PM (#307321)

Those options don't strike me as particularly strong. The assumption is that people won't mind ads in their updates, but that's something that has yet to be proven and could end up being a huge risk.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by axod on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:45PM (#307362)

People will just move to whatever twitter like service there is that doesn't have ads.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by callmeed on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @03:01PM (#307385)

I disagree ... once the user-base reaches a certain level, people will stay simply because everyone else is there.

Nobody moved to an ad-free social network once Facebook started placing ads.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by mattmaroon on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @05:19PM (#307552)

Nobody is clicking on the ads either. When Facebook finally did do something that might make money and forced people to pay attention (Beacon) it was so odious that they had to quit immediately or people would have started moving.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by axod on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @05:26PM (#307562)

I think placing ads in the content (Messages) crosses a line of irritation. Imagine if gmail started inserting adverts inside your emails when you view them. How quickly do you think people would stop using gmail?

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by whatusername on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @07:37PM (#307702)

hotmail inserts adds into my messages when I send them!

Hasn't stopped people using it.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by aneesh on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:00PM (#307292)

Where "lots of options" means advertising in different forms.

Sure they can make some money from subscriptions, but Twitter is not a $50/month or even $50/year service in my opinion.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by wyclif on Thursday September 18, 2008 @02:34AM (#307958)

In order for Twitter to start a subscription model, they'd need international SMS (something they seem to have given up on, as third parties now provide paid SMS bundling) AND IM.

Today, I opened my T-Mo statement, and there was a Twitter ad inside. Still no IM and SMS, though. No matter how big their user base gets, that looks like a show stopper to me.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by josefresco on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @02:35PM (#307350)

It is to some people, the 'Internet celebrity' (Calacanis etc.) crowd would gladly throw thousands/year at Twitter as it allows them to grow their image/social circle.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by mattmaroon on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @05:20PM (#307554)

Those people are far too few to become a reliable source of revenue for Twitter.

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by shafqat on Thursday September 18, 2008 @08:19AM (#308106)

They can turn around tomorrow and say it'll cost 10 bucks a year to use it. Most people will pay to play, just because they've been sucked in. $10 x however many millions of users they have... you do that math!

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by newmediaclay on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @01:41PM (#307263)

They've started to allow users to place ads as their background...they could be the first service that figured out how to allow their users to make money before the actual company can!

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by nostrademons on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @01:51PM (#307281)

No, that would be AllAdvantage.com. ;-)

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by mrtron on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @03:24PM (#307410)

They only lost out to fraud. Any company dealing with users and money experience this - look at PayPal.

AllAdvantage is a perfect example of why you can't allow client side services to be calculating things that really should be done server side. You could send a magical packet that would log all your hours for a month instantly.

Sorry about the offtopic rant :)

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Re:Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months by bigbang on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @03:50PM (#307447)

Twitter Japan has ads, although I would guess JP userbase would be too small to matter

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